


Manual of Barriers

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen, Haunting, Magical Realism, Power of Friendship, Reminiscing, freeform Phillip Jeffries cameo, minimal Chet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:48:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21819187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: What does it take to come back? Where is the open door at the end of the long dark journey?
Relationships: Albert Rosenfield & Constance Talbot, Constance Talbot & Diane Evans, Diane Evans & Albert Rosenfield (Twin Peaks)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Manual of Barriers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beatrice_Sank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/gifts).



> Happy Yuletideeeeeee!!!

**1\. Inattention**

Constance raised the bowl to her chest and whipped her eggs as she looked at the book on the kitchen counter: wok on medium heat, done. Noodles on the other burner, almost cooked. Oyster sauce on the ready. If she was going to spoil herself, she would do it properly, make the smell of mushrooms and soy sauce fill the house and keep her company for the evening. Empty nesters, she told herself, had done worse, historically and sociologically, than a sudden interest in Thai cuisine.

The droning of the TV got lost drowned out by the stove’s happy fizzling, blurred in the background, past a veil of calla lilies and a single kentia palm. Different worlds, the stove and the TV, but both busy, both loud, both inhabiting that house in that moment and keeping the lonely night outside.

In hindsight, Constance could not say what the ad was about. She had only paid attention to the last few seconds of it, peeking at the TV screen past that little forest of her own making, and even those images were decaying in her memory like they were never meant to be there at all. There was no brand. A cursory internet search turned up no results. She would have forgotten about it already if not for the fact that she was chopping green onions when the music on the TV caught her attention, and on screen there were three women, all alike, all wearing old-timey dresses, who played in slow motion with three roses as big as beach balls. Trying, maybe, to push the roses away, but away from one always meant closer to another, and the charade went on. Brains are weird like that. Hers must have gotten the green onions all tied up with the women playing with the roses, because when she tried to think about the latter, she felt like crying.

Half a dozen states away, Albert was having a very normal day. Albert always had very normal days, as of late. Like he’d stopped bothering life and life had been so kind, for once, as to repay the favor.

**2\. Unfamiliarity**

Sunday night dinner with the girls was going alright. Pleasantly banal, as it was wont to be. Get your thrills on stage in the afternoon, unwind later at a nice little restaurant by chatting about club matters, about who the host of the next meeting was going to be, churros recipes, Beckie getting grandchildren soon, Rosa’s struggles against the snails blight, renovating tips, top ten egregious chips flavors. It all suited Constance fine. The rest of them could leave their talents back in the theater; she’d keep her wits close and hover at the brink of the conversation, ready to snipe her friends with her best groan-worthy shots. Any other Sunday, she would have eagerly chipped in something about Rosa slugging it out. She did not. She stared at her beer, feeling the conversation around her fizz and disperse until it went stale. The women at the table kept talking and talking, and surely they were all aware of the elephant in the room, but they were choosing to talk around it instead, without noticing that this emptiness at the center was turning all their words into ashes.

“Girls?” she asked, eventually, because somebody had to. “That new recruit, where’d she come from?”

The sun who’d outshined them all, the singer who had brought a dream of sequins and feathers to their little country cabaret, who had sung of longing and shattered lives, who was she? Constance had been on right after her and had barely caught a glimpse of her face – what she remembered was a vintage suit and a bright wig, and a smoky voice that had a secret message for her, one she could not understand. And then she was gone, exit stage left, and she was not on the programme and she was not in the crowd, and she was not the talk of the evening either, for reasons Constance could not begin to fathom.

Her question and description only raised confusion at the table. Clara thought she was Martha’s friend, Martha thought she was Claudia’s, Claudia had penned the programme herself and there had been no extras that day. The mystery songstress slipped away from the conversation like she had slipped away from the stage and they went back to pleasant, banal chitchat. Constance went back to staring at her beer and saw only the warm golds of the theater lights reflected on the woman’s suit, and she could almost see her face.

She bade the others an early goodnight, feeling one storm of a headache coming.

“Headache?” asked a woman on Arrowhead Road, nearly out of breath walking her chihuahua. “Oh, poor thing. Yes, Armstrong can smell ‘em. It’s not all from here, is it?”

“Is it?” Constance blinked at the woman she did not know, but should know. By the time she could formulate a better question, she and her Armstrong had disappeared into the night.

**3\. Fear**

Albert rubbed his temples at the end of a long and uneventful day. Alone in the comfort of his study, he relished in his books, a glass of Cabernet, the jazzguitar message boards currently aflame with a heated exchange of opinions, the persistent memory of that one xkcd strip about crazy straws. If some distant part of him was atoning in the depth of old woods, he didn’t want to know about it, and the recent sleep aids were working just fine.

“Hey you,” flashed a message on his computer screen. Constance, thankfully. “Apologies for what I’m about to say.”

“I believe that’s my line,” he typed back.

“Only because they’ve gotten you to be sorry about it. Chin up.”

“Well then, o unrepentant paladin of free sneering. Don’t apologize yourself and deal me the deal.”

“No, I mean it. I wouldn’t go back on our mutual positivity pact for a lark.”

“I know. Go on.”

“But...” she hesitated. He cursed the dramatic pauses inherent in instant messaging. “I think I saw Diane.”

At which point he flat-out cursed, out loud.

“That is not possible. It would be nice if you had seen her, but that’s not what happened, given how she’s gone.”

She told him, in quick, simple words, because they knew each other and they knew how not to grate on each other’s nerves by beating around the bush (at least when it was not an elaborate setup for a joke, and by God this was no joke). She told him about the singer, about how eventually, in her bed, she had figured out what her face looked like, and how it was the same face as the women in that strange ad that did not exist.

“No, you don’t understand.”

“Seems to me like you’re not listening.”

“I’m all ears, Constance. And that’s the jokes quota for the evening. Is what you’re telling me plausible? Yes. Does it have the same chances of ending nicely as the proverbial snowball in hell? Also yes. End story.” He reached for his glass.

“You told me about collective suffering?”

“Sure I did, I told you it was a bunch of wishy-washy nonsense. Look. If she did appear to you, it’s because I shot her, Tammy shot her better, Gordon is Gordon, and everyone else in her life disappeared south of thirty years ago.”

“You are admitting she may have appeared to me.”

“I am wallowing, thank you very much.”

“And I understand that, Albert, I really do. But I would like to know what we do next. My top supernatural experience until now has been winning fifty bucks on a scratchcard. And, well, Briggs.”

“Leave it alone and it will go away. Guaranteed. They always do.”

**4\. Inexperience**

If Constance were to pick up, say, a tarot deck and give it a shuffle to get an indication or a sense of direction, the cards she’d draw would find a way to insult her for having shuffled it wrong. Somehow. And she wouldn’t even understand the insult, let alone the indication.

As she stirred her tea and looked outside her apartment’s window on a moody Sunday morning, all she could see was clear, understandable reality. The picture was complex beyond any one person’s understanding, but it was all out there, measurable. Birds’ migration patterns. The gas burning on her neighbor’s stove. Someone’s distant piano practice. One could pick at that complex chaos until it made a modicum of sense.

Where did Diane fit in that pattern? She never understood the finer details of Albert’s pained retelling of that day, how it could be that that striking woman was dead, except not, until she disappeared with Cole and that elusive Dale Cooper and only Cole came back. Collective suffering, indeed. Constance felt for her, and felt for how deeply Albert felt for her, crushed by the guilt of decades. Yet she stood at a sidereal distance from their tragedy, living her life as a country coroner in a simpler world, as firm as the mountains on the horizon.

Where did Constance fit in that pattern?

For lack of better supernatural guidance, she ended up picking up her coat and driving out of town, to the place where Albert had grabbed Gordon back from uncertain other realms. The sky was clear, the shadows sharp. The trees beyond the abandoned house felt bigger than in that old tale. As Constance walked through the tall grass, she raised her arm to catch the cold air.

“...bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,” she hummed to herself as her fist came down empty again and again, “It'll do magic believe it or not… or I am just an old loon.”

“An old loon _and_ a born lyricist,” she added after a brief consideration, proud of her little rhyme.

A shadow moved past the dilapidated fence. Constance took a step back. The air had gotten heavy near the containers. Not colder, not darker, but heavy. The shadow moved again, on the other end of the house. Keeping her back to the fence, Constance moved toward the entrance.

A child blocked her way. Young girl, looking like she’d crawled out of a chimney and having barely made an effort to wipe the soot off her red dress, staring straight at Constance with wide, kind eyes. She held an envelope close to her chest. Slowly, very slowly, without taking her eyes off Constance, the child made a timid gesture to offer it to her.

“For me?” said Constance, leaning down.

The child dropped it in the tall grass and ran off, something inhuman in her movements that was more reminiscent of a monkey.

Kneeling to fetch the envelope, Constance saw that it was a regular mail envelope with no address nor stamps, that unlike its carrier that piece of paper did not look like it had been rubbed against the inside of a chimney, and, last but not least, that on the back there was a doodle drawn with a yellow crayon that resembled some sort of dragon.

She opened the envelope. Her world went dark, vast and cold, emptiness stretching for untold aeons as the stars remained ever out of reach…

Eventually she heard, far beyond her conscience, a faint clapping of hooves. Worried voices beyond the fence. Two pairs of arms lifted her off the ground and onto the warm back of a horse.

**5\. Old walls**

Diane slammed her fists against the door. The motel’s corridors stretched forever. Every twenty-four rooms, a storage closet and a flight of stairs broke the monotony, only to lead to another floor filled with the same flickering lights, the same naked concrete, the same closed fucking doors. Diane had knocked, Diane had rung doorbells, Diane had tried to pick locks, Diane had shouted and Diane had thrown her full weight against the metal doors. As the hours passed and turned to days, and then to indistinct measures of a stilled time, she only had the strength left to drag her feet down the corridors and knock, knowing, every time, that she would find no answer.

She found herself ashamed by the fondness with which she regarded a distant memory: a feeble sliver of her crumbling self stood outside the motel, leaning against a column, and stared into the night. There should be little love for the disillusions and defeats of that night long ago, but she did stand outside the motel, then, and the night air was sweet.

Eventually, her steps brought her back to the one open door. Puffs of smoke trailed like ghosts in the corridor, hanging in the air in an invitation to step inside.

“You have been here already,” said the entity known as Phillip Jeffries as he felt her on the threshold.

“Can it, Phil. Pun intended.” Diane patted the smooth surface of the machinery that towered over the room – Phillip Jeffries himself or Phillip Jeffries’ fancy new tin coat, she never bothered to ask – and sat cross-legged at its base, resting her back on the warm metal. “I’m looking for home.”

“Room eight can be home.”

“Oh that’s so sweet of you. But that’s not what I am looking for. C’mon, special agent. Do your job and figure it out.”

“Then you can stay for a drink, Diane.”

She stayed, for old times’ sake. Until her feet were rested and her knuckles healed.

**6\. Fear (reprise)**

“Talbot, what the fuck.”

Albert stood outside her front door, carrying a briefcase and a bottle of wine. Constance stood inside her front door, clinging to it as if it were a lifeline, wearing a tracksuit and a blanket like a cape.

“Dave told me you called in sick on Monday,” Albert said, frowning deeply as he ran a mental checklist of symptoms he used to see over and over until each patient’s existence wore thin and ultimately faded out altogether.

All the wrinkles made him look like a sad dog, like a mastiff or a bloodhound. Constance gave a tired chuckle.

She motioned to say something coherent like “Smart guy, that Dave”, or “I could have told you that if you had, I don’t know, asked me?”, but there was a more pressing question, one that came from the cold vastness of space where she still floated when she closed her eyes.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Are you a ghost? Did it… did it work? Did I grab you into being, did you disappear and I brought you back?”

What was Albert meant to reply to that? He put a hand on her shoulder and invited himself inside.

“You sounded a bit down in the dumps over messaging,” he said as he made sure she sat comfortably in her couch and got her a cup of hot coffee to go with her stupor. He waited – if he’d gotten good at anything it was waiting – but the subtleties of a masterful understatement were lost on his current audience. “Let me rephrase: you sounded like a reenactment of the wikihow entry on how to cook lasagna and dissociate in six easy steps, and you were already all out of lasagna. And you wonder what I’m doing here?”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“Nonsense. You did the same for me back then.”

“Well, yes. That I did.”

“And now you’ve done… what, precisely?”

It took a while for Constance to find the beginning of her story – it was a beginning Albert didn’t want to hear, too, let alone hear it twice, which did not help, but they found their way around it. She told him about Diane again, the apparitions, what the apparitions made her feel, which was unfairness, mostly. Uselessness. A sense of a bigger world beyond her neat little life, like when she’d talked to Diane herself in those days, a thrill but emptier, scarier. Eventually, her little escapade at the Zone.

Albert had learned patience and only raised an eyebrow. He said nothing about Diane, but nodded now and again. Her presence weighed over them both now, heavier than the sum of her parts. He’d found a kindred soul in Constance in a way the old gang never did get him (except for Tammy, perhaps, but she was so young and had a different path ahead of her). In a way, she lived the life he never could, smaller and unburdened, still holding onto the hope and energy he had lost through the decades. Now his bullshit was coming to poison her too, and it strained the imagination to picture a way in which he could make up for this haunting by proxy, let alone make up to Diane herself, wherever she was. He had almost convinced himself that their favorite ghost had done well to skip him and turn to Constance and she had to go and burn herself to a crisp in her naivety instead. Whole world was fucked and that was that on that.

“Well?” she asked eventually.

“Thought you were lost at the deep end of a fathomless abyss, where’d you find this spark to go 'well?' all of a sudden?”

“Power of friendship?” she offered. “Three’s a company?”

“That’s one way to look at it. Well, what?”

“ _Well_ , what are we going to do tonight, Brain?”

“Same thing we do every night, Pinky… shut the door tight and get a good night’s sleep.”

“Really? And here I was hoping for a training montage.”

“Listen to yourself, Talbot.”

“Oh don’t you ‘Talbot’ me this time, Rosenfield. You’re here, she’s here, put that job experience of yours to good use and help me help her. I know you care.”

“This what you’re thinking? Let’s hear it. What is it that I’m supposed to do? Did you pick out the training montage music already or are we defaulting to Rocky?”

“Take out an ouija board, burn some candles? Don’t laugh. I don’t know what you did. That’s the whole point. Well, not you. Your boss, your colleagues, but you were there even if you were complaining all the time. Gordon told me. Anyway, I was thinking Ghostbusters?”

“Can we _please_ have a serious conversation?”

“I don’t think we can.”

“Fair.” He sighed. “But for the serious part of this talk, and I would not want to cross the streams, as it were, I’ve been failing at this for over thirty years." Every time he had to let go of them. They disappeared and he had to leave them behind or he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Never looking back. Too many failures. Too many...

A loud knocking on a heavy metallic surface startled them both. It banged and banged, from some uncharted place beyond the kitchen, but there was no door there, no big metal slate on which each blow could resonate with a sick, ominous rattle.

“Not your neighbors, I presume? Amateur welders? Post-industrial enthusiasts?”

“Not the neighbors, no.”

Albert picked up all his guilt and rose up.

“Do you need me to spell it out?” he said to the wall. “For old times’ sake? Well, you know how it goes: fuck you too, Diane. If you’re here, just… show yourself, will you. Please.”

**7\. At the end of the road**

“You miss her.”

Constance pointed out the obvious for no better reason that she felt like it was worth pointing it out. The love that poured from that pained reproach could not go unnoticed. Her words made it real. That feeling found a sound, a shape. It could not go missing anymore, it could not hide beyond her curtains.

“You could be here, now, in this very living room. You’re missing out, old girl,” Albert said, still staring at the wall, and went on to uncork his bottle of wine and grab two glasses to serve it in. After a moment’s consideration, he grabbed a third.

Eventually, Constance’s observation reached him and he turned toward her, offering her one of the glasses. “...yes. Obviously.”

“One of a kind?”

“The very best.”

As he spoke, something shifted. Something melted, far away. Something melted within him. An old contrarianism, if nothing else, flooded back in, and Albert felt like taking a stand, like reminding somebody (himself, if nothing else) that Diane was so much more than an inconvenience hurting him and Constance. It came in cycles: once upon a time a similar pain stood between him and Diane and that, too, used to be warm and kind, once.

He told her a story that dated back to when the world was young, when a young agent by the name of Chet Desmond had joined their ranks – or was it later? Was Diane already with them before Coop? Was Albert? The mists of history clouded his tale, but he kept telling it as he remembered it. This Chet Desmond was a hotshot, Albert recalled with fondness, sure of himself and eager to prove it. Just the man for the nascent task force. So he went to the break room and met ‘the secretary’ for the first time, finding her spread on the couch like a big cat who’d just wandered in and decided she owned the place. In his memory, Albert pictured her in a full leopard print – she never lost her taste for it, regrettably, but the Eighties were the time when she’d found that taste in the first place. Now, Chet Desmond, he was not the man for small talk. Neither was Diane. They talked shop, which for a proud agent hand-picked by Gordon, back then, meant UFOs. And she, she played the rationalist skeptic for half an hour, shooting down each and every one of his talking points like clay pigeons at the range. Diane spoke in layman’s terms, never tipping her hand about her level of clearance, which meant half of _his_ arguments, poor bastard, were nipped in the bud. He took to calling her Sphinx after that – Chet’s nicknames could get downright esoteric at times, but enigmatic stone lioness suited her well.

Constance smiled, getting for the first time a taste of the life in that office instead of vague sorrowful ghosts haunting a ruined kingdom. Once Albert was done, she shared one of her own memories of the woman. They were not many: outside the morgue, she had only come across her at the Mayfair’s bar a few times throughout that terrible week. She did not need to tell him, however, that Diane left nothing if not sharp impressions.

She’d looked like a permanent fixture, draped as she was on the stools of Buckhorn’s lone hive of frills and luxury, while Constance had clung to her mall-bought suit feeling stiff, cheap and out of place. And Constance offered her a drink, because it felt like the natural order of things, and Diane asked her if she was flirting, which again would have been the natural order of things, wouldn’t it? Constance could not say if she was. But if Diane expected it, there was no other acceptable option. Then she said: “It’s nice here, isn’t it? There is always music in the air.” And it was Constance’s turn to be unsure of what that meant, but it felt important, so she said “I think that’s Coltrane?” and took it to heart.

Albert could offer many a tale on the topic of Diane and Schrödinger’s flirting. Or plain flirting. She and Phillip Jeffries used to stand on a pedestal of their own when it came to that sort of things.

“Did you guys ever get anything done in that office? Aside from gawping?”

“Since you asked: no.” Albert sighed. “Look at us. We sound like mourners sharing anecdotes at a funeral.”

“I’d listen all night long, but I’m a terrible mourner.”

“With that face? You’re looking better, Constance, but not by a long shot. You are a passable mourner.”

“I am also wearing a tracksuit and a blanket. If this funeral had bouncers, they oughtta throw me out.”

“Let’s skip the funeral, then. She wouldn’t want that.”

“I don’t want a funeral either.”

“And again I say, you need to work on that complexion.”

They grabbed their wine and blankets and graciously moved to the balcony, where they were met by a warm winter evening. Albert found the thread of his story again, found her in it, found himself in it. They talked until the early hours of the morning. The warmth remained. Other terraces were alive with chatter, yellow-lit windows dotted the buildings around them. They found her together, muscle after muscle, bone after bone, each tale a drop of blood.

Someone’s generator must have given up the ghost. The lights faltered for a moment, leaving them alone in the night, then the full weight of reality came back with a high-pitched buzz. When Constance turned to look at her window, she saw through the darkness a figure stretched out on her couch. Her heart beat with the same frantic buzz as the electricity around them but she stood still, letting this weird world take its course.

Diane took her wine, walked out on the balcony, long purple dress trailing behind her, and perched on the railing as if she had always been there.


End file.
